INSPIRATION :: Free C.S. Lewis Quote Printables

To celebrate the life of C.S. Lewis — he died on this day in 1963 — here are some free printables for you to enjoy. And take some time today to pull an old Lewis book of the shelf and read a chapter or two, won’t you? I promise it will be good for your soul.

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.” -Till We Have FacesC.S. Lewis “The sweetest thing” free printable – Click here to download.

“In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter…The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” -The Weight of GloryC.S. Lewis “The scent of a flower” free printable – Click here to download.

“And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.” –The Last BattleC.S. Lewis “Chapter one” free printable – Click here to download.

3 thoughts on “INSPIRATION :: Free C.S. Lewis Quote Printables”

No one has ever written like this before, and no one else can make my heart swell with the longing that hurts and is sweet at the same time. Thank you, Lord, for giving us the writing of this man, so we can glimpse what you have in store for us.

I'm Gina Munsey, a Jesus-lover and a sojourner; a weaver of words, anchored in hope. I am Mexico-born, Eastern Europe-raised missionary kid who ended up being a Californian in Orlando, Florida. I live my humidity-drenched days full of coffee and adventures while my 6-year-old learns Mandarin Chinese and my artist-husband creates worlds from pixels and light. I'm an editor, a magazine contributor, and a writer who has only completed four chapters of my languishing manuscript. On any given day, you can find me in the middle of [home]school surrounded by stacks and stacks of books. Oh, and the name of this blog? Oaxaca -- wuh-HA-kuh -- is in Southern Mexico, where I was born! (See full bio).